“Resilience” is a buzzword we hear a lot these days.
In light of recent events happening around the world, such as the COVID-19 pandemic and the Russia-Ukraine war, psychologists and experts are urging people and organizations to learn, embrace and teach. Resilience.
Some individuals and organizations have begun writing books and starting businesses on the topic of resilience. Resilience Shield (As an example) this is interesting.
The American Psychological Association (APA) defines resilience as:
“…the process and outcome of adapting successfully to difficult or challenging life experiences primarily through mental, emotional, and behavioral flexibility and adaptation to external and internal demands.”
In other words, resilience refers to how an individual or group responds to adverse events such as trauma, tragedy, threats, or major stressors they experience.
Resilience is not about being able to prevent or avoid adversity, because that’s not how the world works.
The stress imposed during these adversities helps us become more resilient.
I see.
Taking the Resilience Shield model as an example, there are six types of resilience: BeliefsTo quote from their website:
Innate – This is the resilience that already exists within you, built on your nature and upbringing, and influenced by your character and values.
heart – How you perceive the world and how you respond to stressors is crucial to developing a strong resilience shield.
body – Sleep. Diet. Exercise. It’s that simple. The more you improve your fitness, the better you’ll recover.
Social – Interaction with other human beings nourishes and strengthens our resilience shield. The support of friends, family and loved ones builds this layer.
Professional – Work can bring stress into our lives, but it can also be empowering and inspiring. Purposeful work, or finding purpose in your work, can tip the scales in your favor.
Indications – A strong resilience shield gives us the strength to embrace the unknown and the unknowable, meaning we can handle any challenge life throws at us.
The APA website includes variations on the above tenets among strategies for building resilience, such as practicing mindfulness.
What’s missing from these definitions is What can be gained from adversity? And in some cases, we may turn to stressors to survive and thrive.
input Antifragility.
“Some things benefit from shocks. They thrive and grow in the face of instability, randomness, disorder and stress. They love adventure, risk and uncertainty. Yet despite the ubiquity of this phenomenon, there is no word for the opposite of fragility. Let’s call it antifragility. Antifragility goes beyond resilience or robustness.” The resilient ones can withstand impact and stay intact, the anti-fragile ones do even better.– Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Antifragility is a term coined by Nassim Nicholas Taleb in his book Antifragility. Antifragile: Benefiting from DisorderI highly recommend you read it.
A classic example of antifragility is the Hydra, a many-headed creature from Greek mythology: if one head is cut off, two more grow back in its place.
But what does antifragility mean?
“Fragile people expect things to go exactly as planned and deviations to be minimized, because deviations do more harm than good. This is why fragile people need to be very predictive in their approach. Conversely, predictive systems give rise to fragility. When you want deviations and don’t care about the variability of outcomes that may come your way in the future, you’re antifragile because most outcomes will be helpful.”
Having the confidence to seek out challenging situations, while also developing the skills to adapt to changing circumstances, is a good start to becoming antifragile.
If your world were turned upside down by adversity, would you have the skills to start over and succeed, or are you so dependent on one aspect of your life that you would struggle to survive if it were taken away?
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